The rules change when a Zombie Apocalypse is part of the plot, naturally. In such a desperate situation, any weapon is a good weapon.

Villain armies typically have more oddly-shaped weapons, weapons with spikes, etc. While not a hard-and-fast rule (see the exception for hammers, below) blunt weapons, especially ridged maces, tend to be evil, possibly due to their lethal practicality, as a crushed shoulder, knee, or skull tends to be more complicated to heal than a clean cut.

An easy way to tell which Mook is just a Mook, is to look at their weapons: light blaster rifle, polearm? Standard Mook. Massive sword or really scary-looking gun? This is at least an Elite Mook, if not a member of the Quirky Miniboss Squad. Weapon that looks suspiciously like the hero's? Uh, oh...

Truth in Television to some extent: The Geneva Convention frowns on the use of certain weapons and certain kinds of melee weapons (such as knives with odd-shaped blades) that do not leave clean wounds.

However, a dual-hooksword-wielding Michelle Yeoh happens to be doubly trustworthy.

Flame Patterned Sword (flamberge): Unless sufficiently elegant, run. Stylish enough swords may serve a positive character, but the flamberge simply looks meaner, and for a good reason as it may leave much nastier wounds. Serpentine daggers mark most users as evil.

Speaking of the BFS. Massive swords are usually a villainous weapon (used often by evil warlords or by The Brute), but quite a few heroes crop up wielding them as well. A heroic BFS wielder is often a Barbarian Hero, often an Anti-Hero, and just about always a badass. Since they typically look like no normal person could wield them, the use of such a weapon emphasizes a character's raw strength. Either that, or they're the hero in an anime or JRPG.

Hammers: More likely to be good than axes due to not overtly spilling blood, and normally used by The Big Guy or dwarves. Also a popular weapon of choice for The Paladin. Sometimes shows up in the hands of brutish bad guys, though. Regular tool-style hammers being used as a Weapon of Choice is usually the sign of Ax-Crazy.

Blunt, club-like found objects: Rarely used by good guys, except in a non-lethal manner. Totally reversed if zombies are in play.

Mace (metal club, often with ridges): Evil. Typically used by the Big Bad or The Dragon as maces were traditionally symbols of power and authority, only to be used by royalty or those in command. However, if the wielder is a priest, it has a much higher chance of being good (but can still beevil).

In settings with lots of undead, much more likely to veer towards good.

Revolver: Often the weapon of a heroic gunslinger. On the other hand, it might be the weapon of a sadist who torments his victims with Russian Roulette.

Assault Rifles: Evil if it's a Communist AK-47, good if it's an American M-16. Either way, usually not a main character. Unless it is an Ace Custom Assault Rifle, which have laser sights and an underslung launcher.

Dagger: Sign of the thief or traitor; generally evil. Often the necessary utensil for Black Magic rituals involving Human Sacrifice.

Hooked/Curved Dagger: Usually the above, but sometimes treated the same as the scimitar.

Knife: Unless the hero is trying a last ditch effort to fight off a villain, wielding a knife is very, very evil.

Knives with a wavy blade are almost always evil, due to their association with ritual human sacrifice. Frequently wielded by evil cultists.

Subverted in Dune, in which body shields stop anything moving above a few cm per second and mutually detonate (with kiloton force) on contact by lasers; knife fighting is the dominant form of close combat.

Early editions of Dungeons & Dragons made their use an evil act. While this was probably a game balance issue (since poison in 1st edition was almost always fatal), it was strange that hacking or bashing an enemy to death over the course of several rounds of combat was considered less evil than a quick death.

Well, it can be considered very dishonorable in that it doesn't give the opponent a fair fight. (You know... the opponent who's casting petrification and disintegration spells at you!)

Similarly, the decorations on a weapon can tell you all you need to know about the wielder's personality. If you come across someone whose sword is engraved with skulls and bones, you should probably start running.

Whip Sword: Variable, it's hard to pin due to its rare usage, but most characters tend to be some variant of The Vamp, who may or may not be evil. note Ivy from SoulCalibur is the most well known example, and she's firmly a hero.

Because shields are very convenient for displaying a symbol, design is key here - a black shield with a skull painted on it is firmly villain material, while a golden or silver shield with a sun emblem is a good sign of some kind of paladin.

Attack of the Clones subverts this, as there are enough Jedi in the field at once for the lesser among them to count as Redshirts.

Martial Arts: Flowing styles and high acrobatics tend to be the domain of good guys and monks; Pressure point poking, open-palmed jabbing, and other "quick and to the point" styles are used by the Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy or Evil Overlord, but can be used by heroes with a no kill code (in which case it's pragmatic) or the Old Master (either so that his students will learn to react quickly, or because he lacks the strength or stamina to use more "heroic" techniques effectively). UnlessKenshiro. Styles like Russian "Systema", as used by the Spetsnaz, are for badasses, typically used by Combat Pragmatists or morally questionable, possibly evil, characters (Systema, for example, is almost all about attacking the joints of the enemy to intentionally cripple them, which thus requires excellent knowledge but also ruthlessness to execute). Good Old Fisticuffs are either way, unless the bad guy knows a style of any type, then it becomes the domain of the "everyman" good guy. She-Fu is neutral, as it lends to catfighting between two parties.

Examples:

In Higurashi: When They Cry, Rena has a weapon◊ that has been described by fans intermittently as a billhook, a machete, a hatchet, a cleaver, or all of them at once. That's pretty much unprecedentedly evil, but the non- edged part of the blade is straight, which is significant.

King Fahn and Lord Ashram of the first Record of Lodoss War anime wield swords of good and evil, respectively, that grow stronger the closer they are to each other.

Most incarnations of Gundam have this, with the protagonists' faction using simple, clean-looking weapons like boxy plasma guns and unassuming white cylinders that project a Laser Blade while the antagonists use nastier-looking ones like large, noisy, belt or pan-fed machine guns, whips, curved swords and axes. The biggest exception to this is Mobile Suit Gundam Wing where the protagonists have extremely flashy, mean-looking weapons while the bad guys have scads of simplistic, mass-produced Mecha-Mooks whose weapons wouldn't look out of place in a modern army.

The crazy Japanese girl Gogo Yubari wields a meteor hammer in Kill Bill.

In The Lord of the Rings Elves use light curved blades and Alliance humans prefer medieval broadswords while Orcs sport crude, angular slabs, and Easterlings are armed with polearms. There's also the curved dagger wielded by Evil Chancellor Wormtongue.

In the 1980 Flash Gordon film, Vultan, King of the Hawkmen, carries an evil-looking mace. However, he is one of the hero's closest allies.

Especially present in the film adaptations of Harry Potter, when wands used by the death eaters have more elaborate and menacing designs than those of the good wizards and witches.

In Star Wars, the light side Jedi use lightsabers with blades that are colored blue, green, purple, yellow, etc... seemingly every color of the rainbow except red, which is the exclusive province of the evil Sith. Along similar lines, the Galactic Empire's weapons are all clean, utilitarian, and mass-produced, whereas the the Rebel Alliance's all appear to be heavily customized and well-used.

In The Raid, one group of tough mooks is described as the machete gang in the credits. You can probably guess from this that they are not on the side of the angels.

Zig zagged in Watchmen. Nite Owl and Silk Spectre 2 are unarmed (good weapon/good guy). Rorsharch is also unarmed (good weapon/anti hero). The NYPD SWAT team uses CAR-15 rifles and the regular beat cops use Smith Wesson Model 10 and Model 15 revolvers (good weapons for good guys), and the criminal exploded by Dr Manhattan uses a sawn-off shotgun (evil weapon/bad guy). The Comedian (little bit of both) uses a Colt 1911 variant (good weapon) and an Ithaca 37 and a flamethrower (evil weapon). In his closet are seen an S&W 686 (good), a CAR-15 (good) a HK91, an HK MP5 (could go either way) and a Franchi SPAS-12 (bad).

Mooks often have hero guns. One of the muggers has a Colt Detective Special, and the killer sent after Veidf had an S&W 586 (good weapon/bad guy). The national guard also have M1 Garand rifles, but gun down unarmed protestors with them (good weapon/bad guy). Conversely, Well-Intentioned Extremist Veidt uses a Walther PPK to kill Moloch, which fits his moral ambiguity.

The high spirits of Adam R. Brown's Astral Dawn utilize a wide variety of astral weapons created from their centers. Caspian's weapon of choice is a silver-bladed katana sword.

A rare exception to "Only villains poison weapons": Sadi, a eunuch on the side of the heroes in the Mallorean, uses a poisoned dagger as his primary weapon.

Justified in that one of the two defining characteristics of the Nyissans is an extensive knowledge and ... creative ... use of pharmaceuticals. (The other one is a positively astounding ability at being devious and conniving.)

While Sadi is a good guy, Nyissans, in general, try to stay out of the fighting and may be seen as amoral.

And from the same series, there's the Ulgo knife, which is generally described as one of the most unpleasant weapons in the world. The Ulgos are good guys. The knife itself is never described in detail - it does, however, possess both a serrated edge and a hook "for pulling things out", and is said to have been designed to "hurt more coming out than going in".

Contrary to the usual rule on daggers, both good and evil Mistborn, including two of the three main protagonists, use daggers as primary weapons.

The orc-like Koloss use an enormous BFS as their signature weapon, to the point where the size of a koloss population can be crudely controlled by increasing or decreasing the number of swords they possess. (If they have too few swords, the koloss will kill each other off in brawls over swords, whereas if they have too many, they make more koloss.

The Aiel are a Proud Warrior Race whose spears are central to their culture. In their view, spears are Good because they can be used to hunt for food, while swords are Evil because they are only used to attack other people. When their predecessors split off from the Actual Pacifist Da'Shain Aiel at the end of the Age of Legends, they chose this compromise to make their collective Batman Grabs a Gun moment more bearable.

The Blacksmith Perrin Aybara carries an axe and a hammer, and eventually follows his mentor's advice to throw the axe away when he starts to enjoy using it on people. Subverted in that he has no qualms about caving people's skulls in with the hammer, although later he and an Asha'man forge him a proper warhammer that's especially lethal against Shadowspawn, suiting the trope more closely.

Live-Action TV

Evil speedsters in The Flash (2014), such as Eobard Thawne, can vibrate their hands so quickly that they can be used to cut through solid matter or rip out/crush internal organs. The titular Flash eventually learns how to perform a variation of this technique for blunt, nonlethal blows. The Season 3 villain Savitar has a Blade Below the Shoulder on each arm.

In Robin of Sherwood, anybody who uses a crossbow will be evil, without exception. This is due to the centuries-old history of the longbow as a symbol for English military might and righteousness, with crossbows being for, eeew, French people and so forth.

Mythology

The swords of Masamune and Muramasa, two legendary Japanese swordsmiths. In general, Masamune's swords are considered to have qualities of good and peace, while Muramasa's blades are considered bloodthirsty. The legend has it that the two had a contest to see who could craft a better sword. Each one made a sword and sent it floating down a river. Masamune's sword peacefully avoided everything, while Muramasa's sword cut everything in its path. Another legend says that a Muramasa sword, once unsheathed, will refuse to leave the user's hand until it draws blood.

Space 1889 the spear-polearm, fork and scythe-resembling weapons the High Martian carry in their prehensile feet sure look nasty.

In Warhammer 40,000, Chaos Space Marines typically wield weapons that look similar to their Loyalist counterparts with the addition of lots of spikes and studs and skulls. Their Terminators also use maces and axes in addition to the standard Power Fist (which they add spikes to anyway.) While both groups have melee-centric squads that favor chain weapons, note how the squads for Chaos Space Marines tend to use Chain Axes, while the squads for Loyalist Marines tend to use Chain Swords.

In Dungeons & Dragons, Good-aligned Clerics traditionally wield maces or other blunt weapons. Evil clerics and fighters often carry flails or other spiky things. The game claimed this dated back to the Middle Ages where the Clergy were allowed to join in battle, but because they were forbidden to "spill blood" they were restricted to using blunt weapons. Because you can totally bash somebody's head in with a mace and not get blood everywhere. Though the idea that warrior priests used maces to not shed blood may have been a misunderstanding of the actual events, and were more likely symbols of authority.

This trope most likely came from Bishop Odo of Bayeux, a kinsman of William the Conqueror, who was trying the game the system (at that time, clergy was not allowed to participate in combat — to this day, for obvious reasons, the Catholic Church frowns VERY HEAVILY on it, and "warrior monk" orders like the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights no longer function as military religious orders)by wading into combat during the Battle of Hastings in 1066 with a weapon that was less likely to shed blood on the rationalization that made it OK.

D&D has made exceptions for various gods with favored weapons (as with Heironeous and the battleaxe pre-3rd edition), but as of 3rd Edition opened up the range of favored weapons for clerics pretty widely - especially for gods of war and combat. Most fit this trope fairly well even so. In Eberron, for example, most of the good gods still favor traditionally "good" weapons or those that are derived from tools with a functional purpose (the goddess of feasts and abundance likes sickles, which are a farming tool), while the evil gods still favor "evil" weapons (the god of death likes the Sinister Scythe, whose evil connotations overcome its own use as a farming tool).

In Warhammer, Priests of Sigmar tend to fight with two-handed battle hammers, and lead armies from the front. Since Sigmar is a god of war and his symbol is a hammer, this is all justified. Priests of Sigmar tend to be a bit overbearing and have Knight Templar tendencies, but are generally good guys.

1001 Science Fiction Weapons for D20, has a few weapons that are usually used by evil, such as certain of the rays in the pulp weapons chapter, the Rod of the Lawgiver, and most of the radioactive weapons (well if not evil, then certainly bat guano crazy, given that you're holding a piece of radioactive material in your hands to hit someone with). Most of the weapons, however, are meant to be accessible, dependent on the situation, to the PCs. Scythes is one particular example; in that there are many scythes which one can understand a farmer owning, because their technological enhancements may actually improve their ability to reap wheat (although, why are you reaping wheat by hand when you can economically create force field and superchilled blades?). However, the superheated scythe sets wheat on fire, so it cannot be used for harvest; it is stated that if you see one of these on the wall then the person is probably a villain.

Ace Combat has a variant; It has been noted that in almost every game, the protagonist squadron and sometimes his allies usually fly Western Fighter Aircraft (usually American) while the antagonist ace squadron(s) usually use either high-tier Russian fighters (usually a variant of the Su-27 Flanker ). This is however subverted multiple times.

In Ace Combat 2 the protagonist squadron (presumably, given the cover art) flies the Su-35 Super Flanker, while four of the ZOE aces use American jets (the last uses one of the series' first two fictional fighters). The remake switches this around, where the protagonist is now, as always, associated with the F-22, but ZOE remains free of Russian craft, and only one of the four other important ace squadrons encountered uses non-NATO aircraft.

Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies plays this straight as can be for the most important pilots on both sides, where the player Mobius One is associated with the F-22 and his rivals throughout the game in Yellow Squadron use the Su-37, but other allied pilots zigzag this, particularly in the missions that have the most impact on the story - there can be a mix of MiGs-29s and Su-35s alongside F-16s and F/A-18s.

In Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War one of the enemy ace squadrons you fight flies the F-15 S/MTD; this is in part justified in that they're actually infiltrators of your country's air force, and their counterparts in the enemy fly Su-35s. For the final encounter, both come together to face you in prototype Sukhoi craft, while the player's squad is associated with the F-14A.

In Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, out of the 12 major ace squads you face in the game, only three (Gelb's Su-37s, Gault's Su-47s and Schwarze's MiG-31s) play this trope straight; the rest mostly use American jets (such as Grun's F/A-18s, Silber's F-4 and F-16s, or Wizard's YF-23s and F-16XLs) with the others likewise focusing on other Western nations like France (Espada Two's Rafale) and Sweden (Espada One's Draken, Indigo's Gripens). This game also codified the series' trend where this trope is only played halfway, as the protagonist ends up being associated with an American jet (the F-15 in Cipher's case) while the final boss instead uses a completely fictional fighter (in this case the "ADFX-02").

In Ace Combat: Joint Assault Varcolac uses both Russian and Western planes; fittingly enough, they start as the allied Rigel squadron before defecting early on.

Ace Combat Infinity zigzags this in the campaign, where the initial flight lead for the Bone Arrows, Viper, flies a MiG-21, while Omega and Bronco stick to the Eurofighter and F-16F, but the later addition Zebu flies the MiG-29. The player character Reaper, as usual, can fly whatever they want (with the suggested rental sets varying between American and Russian jets depending on the mission), but as with most other post-X protagonists, rewards from ranking events have associated him with the F-22. Players in online can likewise use whatever they want, frequently leading to combinations of American, Russian, French, Swedish, Japanese, and fictional aircraft.

In Halo, this shows up in the two warrior races of the Covenant: The characteristic weapon of the (ultimately) good Elites is the Energy Sword. The signature weapon of the viscous Brutes is a big, well, brutish Gravity Hammer. This applies to the designs of rest of their weapons too; Elites tend to favor organically elegant curves, while Brutes favor making everything spiky.

In Knights of the Old Republic there are sometimes weapons or objects (lightsaber crystals for example) that can only be used if one has the proper alignment.

Partially averted in the first WarCraft, where the human knights used flails despite being good guys. Aside from that, the Orcs use more savage-looking weapons than the humans. Warcraft III's Frostmourne makes it amply clear that it's evil. Terrifyingly serrated blade? Horrifying ornaments? Emits a nasty aura of ice and cold? The only way it could get any more Obviously Evil is if it was actually warning potential wielders that it's going to steal their soul... oh wait, it actually does that too! Shame Arthas had gone so far into the deep end at that point that he couldn't care less.

The Command & Conquer: Generals mod Rise of the Reds completely and utterly flips the stereotype of western nations using "good" and "humane" weapons. The European Union-successor ECA uses all manner of horrifying weapons including lethal microwave weapons, cluster bombs, land mines, nerve gas and even nukes, all out of sheer desperation.

In Homestuck, The Hero picked up a hammer for Mundane Utility and leveled up with it. The Axe-Crazy pure evil psychopath is also the only one who wields a full sword (though another hero uses swords, what he actually wields are swords broken in half.) Later also demonstrated with the good and evil personalities of one character: the good wields a magic wand that can turn into a pistol (a precise weapon that cannot be fired multiple times in succession), while the evil wields a fully automatic assault rifle (a highly destructive weapon that will likely cause a ton of collateral damage).

Zeetha in Girl Genius has two katars as her weapon of choice. She is described as a "swordmistress", and is also quite unambiguously good.

The sequel series, The Legend of Korra, continues this trend. Police Chief Lin Beifong and her employees use whips controlled by Metalbending, but Amon and his Equalists provide more technologically advanced weapons, most notably taser prods and electric gloves. Amon's Lieutenant (who's only ever referred to as Lieutenant) uses two kali-sticks hooked up to a backpack generator for added Shock and Awe. He's terrifyingly proficient with them and something of an Ensemble Darkhorse.

Megatron from The Transformers is literally an Evil Weapon, his disguise form being a Walther P38.

For the trifecta, Transformers Prime has the Star Saber, the sword of the original Primes' leader Prima, now in Optimus' possession as of late Season 2. Because of the threat this poses to his Decepticon legions, Megatron forges a counterpart out of Dark Energon for his own use: the Dark Star Saber.

Generated by the Amulet of Daylight, the Sword of Daylight is a bladed weapon that can only be wielded by the trollhunter though Angor was able to steal it using The Worsening Curse Mark he placed on Jim. The blade shrinks and grows to accommodate the physiology of its wielder (much like the rest of the armor) and is composed of solid, metallic "daylight", making it especially effective against trolls.

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